Hi yall, I was wondering if any of you have ever tried installing two sound devices in your systems? I did but the second card does not seem to play any sounds. Win2000 and DirectSound seems to support multiple cards but I just can''t get it to work. If anybody cares, I install two SB!Live cards in my system. I also checked for system conflict and there are none. Does anyone have any ideas?

I''ve installed two cards at once before. Were a SB Live! and a Yamaha XG card (YMF-724 chip) in the same system. Both produced sound, but a few quirks arose which I believe are unresolvable:

(1) They would conflict at times when DOS programs would try to detect sound hardware. Not really a problem as long as they don''t have overlapping resources and you can manually configure the program.

(2) You lose both gameport capabilities. They used to provide a way of turning of the gameport on the sound cards, but stopped doing so when motherboards stopped coming equipped with them. I''m not sure if it affects the MIDI port capabilities, though. I didn''t get far enough with testing before that computer befall a horrible fate.

As for doing two SB Live!s, it looks possible, as you need to select one of them to use in the Liveware. On the same token, I don''t think you can use both simultaneously for the same reason. Maybe a better solution could be found if you told us why your trying to use two in the same system.

Well, in my situation, I need multiple cards to support more than 64 active sound buffers at once. In reality, I would need to support over 200 simultaneous sounds (as a goal)!

Since my lat post, I''ve been looking into an algorithm that could priorities the sound according to its volume, distance from listener, duration and a priority level. I know that DirectSound has a managment system, but I am not sure if it take into account all the parameters I need (I did not have time to look into it yet).

Hmm

I know Yamaha has a card capable of handling 128 simultaneous audio streams, but the price is quite steep. I think your on the right track looking into a software solution, but of the wrong type.

Quite often two sounds are mixed together in the software before it is sent to the hardware to support more sounds. This works easily if no effects are applied to it. Perhaps with combining the sorting you were talking about (how close sounds are relative to each other) with mixing (sounds that are close to each other in the soundspace with similar effects applied to them), you can achieve the result your looking for.